The secret in the attic

Every summer, Noah spent two weeks with his grandparents in an old stone house surrounded by wheat fields. He knew every room by heart except one: the attic. You got there by a narrow ladder, through a hatch that was always shut, and Grandpa liked to say it was "full of dust and old junk."

That summer, on the second night, a noise above his bedroom woke Noah up. Tap. Tap tap. A scraping sound, then nothing. He lay very still under the sheet, his heart thumping. The noise came back the next night, and the one after, always around ten o'clock, always in the same spot. At breakfast he mentioned it. Grandma looked at Grandpa, Grandpa looked at his toast, and nobody really answered.

Noah decided to investigate. He wrote down the times in a notebook. He noticed that Grandpa went to bed late, long after Grandma, and that some mornings there was sawdust in his hair. He also discovered that the rungs of the attic ladder didn't have a single speck of dust on them.

On the fourth night, when the tapping started again, Noah took his torch and crept out on tiptoe. The hatch was open a crack, and yellow light was leaking through. He climbed the rungs one at a time, very slowly, and poked his head through the opening.

There was nothing scary in the attic. A bulb hung between the beams, and under it Grandpa was bent over a workbench with a small hammer in his hand. In front of him sat a wooden boat as long as an arm, with a varnished hull and three masts that still had no sails. Grandpa jumped, then burst out laughing. "Well. Looks like I've been caught."

He waved Noah over. "Your mum started this boat when she was your age. We built it together up here on summer evenings. Then she grew up and moved to the city, and it stayed here, half finished." He ran his hand along the hull. "I wanted to finish it for your birthday. But then I thought it would be better to finish it with you." On the side, Noah saw a name painted by hand, a little crooked: "The Poppy." It was his mother's handwriting from when she was small.

They worked a while longer, Noah passing the tiny nails while Grandpa tapped them in gently. Then Grandma appeared at the top of the ladder with three mugs of warm milk, not surprised in the slightest. When Noah went back down to bed, the tapping in the ceiling didn't frighten him any more. He lay awake for a bit in the dark, picturing the sails they would sew tomorrow, and fell asleep before he had picked their colour.